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What is your voting red line? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This goes to all the peeps who support parliamentary voting as a valid political action.

If your society has been steadily progressing towards fascism for decades regardless of your voting (like the USA has been), is there any point, any action which will convince you that voting ultimately doesn't work?

Is so, what is it? What would your government have to do for you to acknowledge that voting doesn't matter? For many people, it was of course, supporting genocide (which is why so many states desperately try to deny a genocide is ongoing). But if genocide isn't, what is yours?

Eventually a society which has been slowly progressing towards fascism regardless of voting, will become fascist. And we all know what comes after that. There's always one thing where I think even the most hardcore parliamentarian will agree that voting ultimately didn't work: When they're personally being force-marched to the mass grave-sites.

Would that be your point? Or does it come earlier? If so, when?

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (25 children)

That's not the discussion we're having. I want to know your red line.

So it's not gas chambers, then it's somewhere earlier. So where is it?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (24 children)

I've answered your question very directly. I did it in my first sentence, and then spent a while explaining further what I meant.

Since you've attempted to prevent me saying things that don't fit your favorite way of looking at it, let me take a moment to explicitly reject that way of conversing, and expand a little but more on some of the things that aren't your favorite way of looking at it ("the discussion we're having"):

What's your red line? Climate destruction? Mass deportations? The collapse of even the fragile oligarch-friendly US "democracy" and the adoption of full-throated "enemies go into the camps, there is only one party" fascism, where hostile media gets shut down, protests get suppressed with deadly violence with no repercussions? Accelerated genocide in Gaza, new genocide in Ukraine? War in Europe? Shutting down NOAA and destroying climate science in the US? Destruction of universities that aren't friendly to the allowed politics? Nuking hurricanes? A million people dying of a preventable disease? Are any of those red lines?

Because you could spend half a day trying to prevent those things from coming about, but you're explicitly rejecting the idea of doing so. So if those kinds of things aren't red lines for you, what in the loving fuck is? Or is this massive concern about bad things happening in the world limited to only one place and one issue, and something like billions of people dying because of climate change in the not-too-distant future excluded from the idea of being present within this invented concept of "red lines?"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (23 children)

None of these things are prevented by voting. I am doing the only thing that works: Direct action

I’ve answered your question very directly. I did it in my first sentence, and then spent a while explaining further what I meant.

You said you'd never reject voting so long as there's a difference in the outcomes, no matter how small. I then presented you with one such example and you rejected voting. So what is it?

[–] winterayars 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Some of those things in the post above i'll grant you. Some of them absolutely are on the ballot though, undisputably: One of the candidates in this election has promised new concentration camps and forced deportation for millions, which counts as genocide. The other candidate has not.

One of the candidates is definitely going to side with Putin against Ukraine. The other (major) candidate is going to continue the "we'll help Ukraine survive but not win" policy of the current administration.

One of the candidates has promised to shut down NOAA and was hugely detrimental to climate science (and science of all types) the last time he was in office. One has not and was not.

One of the candidates has spoken out in opposition to universities in general, the other one just wants to arrest anyone who complains about genocide too loudly. I'll add: the wapo decided not to endorse this year because of Trump's retribution against Bezos the last time he was in office and maybe there were some new threats made this time. (And that's just the one that's in the news lately. Trump got a lot of revenge on people he thought were not sufficiently loyal to him personally last time.)

The whole COVID thing... just in its entirety. Do you think if Hillary Clinton were President things would have gotten to where they are now? We could have beat this thing. We literally accidently wiped out a couple strains of the flu. We just... chose not to. I'm not saying COVID would have been beaten if Clinton were President but i will say there would be a real difference if the president weren't up there encouraging people to drink bleach.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I repeat, none of these are prevented through voting or else there wouldn't be a genocide either. What politicians promise or not is irrelevant and mostly lies.

But that's not what our discussion is about.

[–] winterayars 3 points 2 months ago

What do you mean "prevented"? It's not as if pulling the lever invokes some magic spell that makes these things impossible but nothing does that and that's not the claim people are making. There are significant, real, material, factual, likely, stated, and historical differences in outcomes.

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